1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to the transportation of cargo by land, sea or air. More particularly, the invention relates to an online auction method and system whereby users of online systems, namely, customers, freight forwarders and carriers, may negotiate cargo rates with each other in an online, anonymous manner. In addition, the invention relates to an online system at which freight forwarders and carriers may post published rate and discount information for land, sea and air bearing cargo vessels to allow customers the opportunity to evaluate competitive prices, preferably in one consolidated location (e.g., a web site).
2. Description of the Related Art
The World Wide Web is the Internet's multimedia information retrieval system. In the web environment, client machines effect transactions to web servers using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is a known application protocol providing users access to files (e.g., text, graphics, images, sound, video, etc.) using a standard page description language known as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML provides basic document formatting and allows the developer to specify "links" to other servers and files. In the Internet paradigm, a network path to a server is identified by a so-called Uniform Resource Locator (URL) having a special syntax for defining a network connection. Use of an HTML-compatible browser (e.g., Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer) at a client machine involves specification of a link via the URL. In response, the client makes a request to the server identified in the link and, in return, receives a document or other object formatted according to HTML. A collection of documents supported on a web server is sometimes referred to as a web site.
One of the technical advantages of the World Wide Web is the ease with which information may be posted and retrieved by users. Any computer user may navigate to a web site of interest and obtain relevant information hosted by the site. Thus, in the freight industry, many freight forwarders and carriers now have web sites that include posted rate information for the specific carrier. A customer (namely, an entity that desires to ship given cargo by land, sea or air) may navigate to the freight forwarder's or the carrier's web site using a conventional web browser and obtain useful shipping and rate information. While this approach is advantageous, a user cannot obtain competitive rate information without having to visit multiple third party sites and manually comparing the information located during such searching. Moreover, most sites will not even provide rate information to a user without the user first identifying itself (perhaps in a secure manner) to the carrier. Further, even if customers do spend the time searching across multiple sites to obtain competitive rate information, they are still limited to accepting the posted shipping lanes and/or rates.
It would be highly desirable to provide an improved online business method wherein customers can obtain cargo rates anonymously from one or more freight forwarders and/or carriers, and negotiate shipping routes and pricing with freight forwarders and carriers. The present invention solves these problems.